Every year Mountaineering Scotland invites people to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – to put into writing their experience of the hills and mountains.
The Mountaineering Scotland Mountain Writing Competition is open to all, and entries can be fact or fiction, with categories for prose and poetry, just so long as the subject matter has a connection with any aspect of mountaineering, rock climbing, walking or ski mountaineering / ski-touring.
The 2020 competition is now open. See here for rules.
Judges may be Mountaineering Scotland Board members and staff, past competition winners and well-known authors or journalists.
The winning entries will be announced in February.
Read here to enter the Mountaineering Scotland Mountain Writing Competition.
Mountaineering Scotland has encouraged creative mountain writing through the competition since 1987, when the competition was started by the then President, Graham E Little. Past Vice President Ingrid Parker introduced a poetry category in 1997.
The coordinator for the annual writing competition is Tommy McManmon.
Tommy is a former winner of the prose section, with People of These Glens in 2012. He lived and worked on Knoydart for over 12 years, during which time he won the Scotsman/Orange Communicator Award for Scottish journalistic writing. He’s recently completed a Masters degree with the Water, Engineering and Development Centre in Loughborough, and now works for the Pentlands Hills Regional Park.
Tommy McManmon
Read the winning entries from the 2019 Mountain Writing Competition